[Courses] Cantonese language courses announced!
The Department of Asian Studies is thrilled to offer Canada’s first for credit university Cantonese Language program. Thanks to a generous donation by brothers Alex and Chi Shum Watt, we will be offering 2 sections of beginner level courses during the 2015/16 school year and then both beginner and intermediate level courses beginning the following year in 2016/17.
CNTO 301 Basic Cantonese I
Elementary level (part I) course in Cantonese for non-heritage learners with no prior exposure to or background in Cantonese. Focus on training for basic oral skills in Cantonese. Open to speakers with no prior Cantonese speaking background.
CNTO 303 Basic Cantonese II
Elementary level Cantonese for non-heritage learners. Continuation of CNTO 301.
[Webcast] Cantonese Worlds Workshop (2015)
Presented by: Hong Kong–Canada Crosscurrents Project
14–15 May 2015
St. John’s College, University of British Columbia
Over the last 50 years, migrations between Hong Kong and Canada have transformed cities such as Toronto and Vancouver. Significant changes in real estate, business, philanthropy, and education, as well as cultural transformations in language, popular media, and mass consumption have reshaped societies on both sides of the Pacific. Flows of people, goods, and ideas have been multidirectional–even as hundreds of thousands of Hong Kong Chinese became Canadian citizens, Canadians of both Chinese and non-Chinese heritage also migrated to Hong Kong for work and family. Counting the estimated 300,000 Canadian passport holders living in Hong Kong would rank it among the ten largest “Canadian” cities!
The Hong Kong-Canada Crosscurrents Project looks back on the last half century in order to understand how the migration of people, goods, and ideas across the Pacific has created a complex crosscurrent of dense and sometimes surprising connections, including the transformation and re-animation of a Cantonese Pacific world that had spanned the ocean for centuries.
Cantonese Worlds is a two-day workshop that aims to begin an important conversation about how to make sense of the transformations of the last 50 years. In gathering leading scholars and observers to lay out an initial set of workshop themes for discussion, this pilot process will help create guiding questions that will shape the next few years of research, outreach, and public education. Initial themes might include, for instance, the role of the Cantonese language historically in shaping linkages between Hong Kong and Canada, or how the resurgence of Cantonese popular culture and music has been a formative element in youth identities. We invite all those interested in examining the last half century of crosscurrents between Hong Kong and Canada to participate in this important undertaking.
Keynote: “The Past, Present, and Future of Cantonese Language and Culture”
Is Cantonese a “dialect” or a “language”? is it a “culture” or a distinct “society”? Or is Cantonese something both more and less than all of these? The keynote for this workshop introduces how we might think about “Cantonese Worlds” both historically and in the present. Drawing upon the migration of peoples across the globe who spoke various forms of what we might consider “Cantonese,” we consider the “Cantonese Worlds” that have been made historically over the last 500 years, and their prospects in the present day.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccp9q9MTs1k[/youtube]
Speakers: Henry Yu and Zoe Lam
Panel: “Musicking the Cantonese Language: From Cantonese Opera to Cantopop”
The tonal language of Cantonese plays a crucial role in the genesis, performance, and dissemination of Cantonese opera and Cantopop. An examination of the melodic and rhythmic properties of classic Cantonese operas such as Dong Dik Sang’s The Flower Princess (1957) reveals song-writing principles that in turn explain music and lyric relationships in Cantopop. Using the concept of “musicking” developed by Christopher Small, this panel plans to explore the dynamic relationships between language and music. On the one hand, it investigates the ways in which the tonal language of Cantonese provides the musical foundation for Cantonese opera and Cantopop. On the other hand, it explores the ways in which Cantonese opera and Cantopop help sustain Cantonese-speaking communities in Asia and North America.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=As5VAZUs3JQ[/youtube]
Speakers: Hedy Law, Zoe Lam, and Gloria Wong
Panel: “Collecting Hong Kong”
Hong Kong, of course, exists both in reality and in imagination. To think about Hong Kong is, in part, to think through the remains and the artefacts. How then has Hong Kong been collected (and recollected)? What are the challenges and opportunities? And how has what has been collected shaped the story that is Hong Kong? In the spirit of initiating a dialogue, speakers of the panel will draw from their backgrounds and expertise to explore some of these issues.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5myYYvh9sFo[/youtube]
Speakers: Leo K. Shin, Clement Tong, Jack Leong, Allan Cho, and Eleanor Yuen
Panel: “The Past and Future of Cantonese Media”
Contemporary media studies continue to be preoccupied with the relation between media, mobility and place. On the one hand, the dissemination and consumption of media content has become ever more mobile: podcasts, youtube, instagram seem to defy boundaries and locations. On the other hand, the role of media in place-making and in forging identity and belonging seems more significant than ever before. This panel explores — from the perspectives of media producers, critics, and consumers — the past, present and future role of Cantonese media in forming and sustaining sociality and intimacy across different spaces.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xa39yRYYdCg[/youtube]
Speakers: Helen Leung, Zoe Lam, Kenneth Tung, Liam Doherty, Karin Lee, and Gabriel Yiu
[Webcast] Youth, Pop Culture and Media, and Not Speaking Cantonese
Forum Series for the Hong Kong Canada Crosscurrents Project (2014-2019)
Featuring: The Honourable Dr. Vivienne Poy
Dr. Leo K. Shin (UBC History and Asian Studies)| Dr. Helen Leung (SFU Gender, Sexuality & Women’s Studies)| Dr. Henry Yu (UBC History)
Thursday, October 2, 2014 (3:00-5:00 p.m.)
St. John’s College at the University of British Columbia
2111 Lower Mall, Vancouver
Related Media Coverage:
Collection of Media Interviews with UBC Professor Dr. Leo Shin
[Gifts] Donation to support Cantonese Studies at UBC announced!
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEAtahbi4HY[/youtube]
Last night at the 2013 Yip So Man Wat Memorial Lecture, Gage Averill, Dean of Arts, announced a $2,000,000 donation to sponsor the development of a Cantonese Studies program at UBC. The program will include Cantonese language courses, Cantonese literature courses and is an extraordinarily generous gift by brothers Alex and Chi Shum Wat. We believe this is one of the largest donations ever in Canada towards a language studies program and, with this donation, UBC will now be among few institutions that offer a Cantonese Studies program.
[Webcast] Literary Adaptation and Cultural Negotiation in Hong Kong Cinema of the 1950s
Professor Leung Ping-kwan 梁秉鈞 (pen name: Ye Si 也斯) is a highly prolific poet, novelist, cultural critic, and multimedia artist. Dr. Leung is Chair Professor of Comparative Literature, Lingnan University in Hong Kong. His recent research on the film culture of Hong Kong in the 1950s formed the basis of this year’s Wat Lecture. Contrary to the common belief that Hong Kong cinema excels only in martial arts and gangster genres but has little to do with literature, recent research (Hong Kong Film and Literature Filmography, 1913-2000 [Hong Kong: Centre for Humanities Research, Lingnan University, 2005]) has shown that more than a thousand Hong Kong films have been adapted from literature since the beginning of the film industry (with the 1950s and 1960s as the high points). This talk examines how Hong Kong culture has evolved since the 1950s, and examines how directors and writers drew on traditional and modern Chinese literary works as well as foreign and popular resources to develop alternative Chinese cultures–cultures that would not have been possible to develop in Mainland China.
Hong Kong cinema from the 1950s made adaptations not only from mainstream twentieth-century writers such as Lu Xun, Ba Jin, and Mao Dun but also from unacknowledged writers such as Shen Congwen and Eileen Chang. It continued to adapt from the literary works of Tolstoy, Maupassant, and Dickens when its counterpart in the mainland had ceased to do so. And it continued to adapt from traditional opera and romance (the “Mandarin Duck and Butterfly” stories) when the latter were severely criticized in the north.
This talk focused in particular on some rarely seen films adapted from Lu Xun, Tolstoy, and traditional opera. Its objectives were to highlight the literary varieties in Hong Kong culture, to clarify its historical links with Chinese and Western cultures, and at the same time to trace the formation of the characteristics that contributed to the development of Hong Kong culture.
The Yip So Man Wat Memorial Lectures are made possible by the generous support of Messrs. Alex and Chi Shum Watt in honor of their mother, the late Mrs. Wat, and her passion for Chinese literature and culture. Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and hosted by the Department of Asian Studies.
Biography
Leung Ping-kwan teaches literature and film studies at Lingnan University and has published extensively on urban culture and film studies, among which are Hong Kong Culture (1995) and Hong Kong Literature and Cinema (2012). He has published fifteen volumes of poems, a novel, a novella and four collections of short stories, as well as 10 volumes of essays on urban culture. He was awarded Artist of the Year 2011, Writer of the Year 2012, and he is a recipient of an Honorary Doctoral Degree in Literature conferred by the University of Zurich, Switzerland in 2012 for achievements in creative writing, and his contributions to the studies of modern Chinese literature.
Select Books and Articles Available at UBC Library
Leung, Ping-kwan. (2007). Islands and Continents: Short Stories by Leung Ping-kwan. John Minford, Brian Holton, Agnes Hung-chong Chan (Eds.) Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. [Link]
Leung, Ping-kwan (2012). City At the End of Time: Poems by Leung Ping-kwan. Trans. Gordon T. Osing and Leung Ping-kwan. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. [Link]
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